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What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. 

But then again, Shakespeare didn’t have to create a website and publish Romeo and Juliet on Amazon. 

I naively assumed that typing ‘The End’ on the manuscript was ‘job done’. How wrong I was. At a rough guess, I would say that writing the story is probably 20% of the work required. I’ll return to what was involved in a later blog. Today is all about names.

When I decided to publish independently, it seemed pretty straightforward. I had a techie background. I’d built and run several websites. I’d even read the odd manual, although I would deny this if ever called to testify in an IT tribunal.

Imagine my surprise that the domain name RoyBurgess.com was still available. I’d always assumed I would have a stalker somewhere, publishing every detail about my life. Anyway, I registered and started to build the site. To my dismay, it quickly became apparent that WordPress had moved on a bit since I’d last used it, and some training was in order. If you are contemplating using the excellent WordPress to build your site, I recommend the Tyler Moore tutorial. It covers nearly everything you could ever want to know in two hours. I just noticed an updated version that claims to do the same in one hour. Tyler may achieve this by simply speaking twice as quickly, but I doubt it. My advice is – don’t try to include everything on your site at once. You end up with a mish-mash of stuff rather than a well planned, consistent site. I’m still making the changes to try to achieve this.

I’m waffling now. The whole point of this post is to recommend that you do a straightforward thing before creating your site. I didn’t do it and wished I had. So what is this gem? 

Check Amazon for authors with the same name! 

Very simple and blindingly obvious, but I didn’t. Of course, somebody (I even know his name!) got there first and published a book years ago—just one. But I didn’t want to create confusion by becoming the other Roy Burgess.

My solution was to add my middle initial. It was good enough for Iain Banks, and it was good enough for me. He added the M (for Menzies) when he started to write science fiction alongside his other books. So I became Roy M. Burgess (not Menzies) for publishing purposes. However, I thought it would complicate things to change the website’s name (not to mention quite a lot of work to which I am allergic). 

So, if you are about to publish, make sure you know what your name is before setting up your website. Kai Saxon Shakespeare fell for it, had to change his name to William and look how that turned out.